His 35-hour operation flew by for him

June 02, 2006

When Nick Stone fully regained consciousness in the emergency room, he wanted the doctors to know one thing. "I told them I had beaten all my friends in (the everyone-for-himself basketball game) '21' before I had my seizure," says the seventh-grader at South Bend's Marshall Intermediate School. He needed his good fortune to continue. Nick and his parents -- Jennifer and Jeff Stone -- were told that he had a mass on his brain the size of a grapefruit. Nick still isn't sure how big a grapefruit is. "I don't really eat them," the 13-year-old says. But a softball? He understands that size. "It may have been growing on his brain since he was born," says Jennifer Stone, a nurse and the practice manager at Northwest Family Medicine on Portage Road. "The tumor was actually growing into his skull. "We just had no idea." Nick had had another seizure several months earlier, and it was attributed to a migraine. Bill Moor Commentary "And I was feeling fine when I was playing basketball with my friends that Tuesday (May 2 after a half day at school)," he says. But on his short walk home from the neighborhood game on South Bend's south side, he collapsed on the sidewalk. A neighbor quickly called his family, and an ambulance was summoned. After the CT scan at Saint Joseph Regional Medical Center, Dr. Michael Helms, Nick's primary physician at Northwest, told Jennifer he needed to be at Indianapolis' Riley Hospital for Children. He was taken there by ambulance and scheduled for an operation on Friday after several tests and procedures. "I kept waiting to wake up and have this nightmare end," Jennifer admits. Instead, a guardian angel came into their lives in the person of Dr. Jodi Smith, a Riley neurosurgeon. "She can't be much bigger than 4-foot-11 and 90 pounds," Jennifer says, "but she must be like Mighty Mouse." Smith showed stamina almost beyond belief. "Nick went into pre-op at 8 a.m. on that Friday and didn't come out of surgery until 7 p.m. Saturday," Jennifer says. "It only seemed like a minute to me," Nick says with the hint of a smile. But it was 35 hours -- almost a day and a half of nonstop surgery. "And during that time, Dr. Smith took only one five-minute break to go to the bathroom," says Jennifer, who received an update every hour. "Everyone knew it was going to be a long operation, but not that long." Smith ended up removing more than 90 percent of the large benign mass, and Nick was left with a scar across the top of his head that runs from one ear to the other. His hair will soon hide it, but for now, he wears a stocking cap to school. "I'm not self-conscious about it," he admits. "I just don't want to gross out anybody." But he gives his friends a peek from time to time. Nick was in Indianapolis for just six days and back to school less than two weeks after his operation. "He's a pretty tough kid," his mom says. On June 13, he will return to Riley to see how his recovery is going and what to do with the remainder of the tumor. Nick seems more interested in when he can get back to his regular sports. "The doctor said I will have to wait a year to play football again, but I've been able to start golf and shoot baskets," he says. A full recovery seems a strong possibility. "This has certainly strengthened our faith, especially in friends who have stepped up and really helped us out with their support," Jennifer adds. Nick even admits his older brother Michael, 15, and his younger sisters Jessie, 9, and Amanda, 6, have been a lot nicer to him since his operation. That will probably change when Nick's hair grows out and his strength returns. But who would have ever known he had a tumor the size of a grapefruit -- or a softball -- on his brain? "I won at basketball just before it happened," Nick likes to point out. A far bigger battle appears to be going his way, too. Bill Moor's column appears on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Contact him at bmoor@sbtinfo.com, or write him at the South Bend Tribune, 225 W. Colfax Ave., South Bend, IN 46626; (574) 235-6072.